Sunday, May 1, 2016

As a classroom teacher, I am always looking for innovative activities or lessons that will engage my 2nd grade bilingual students in new discoveries. ELL students need lots of exposure to various kinds of experiences in all content areas of learning. They struggle with vocabulary and background knowledge so it is important that teachers bring in as many experiences as possible to help with the language barrier.

We were studying about basic animal needs and characteristics in Science so I decided to integrate a virtual reality lesson to my unit. I borrowed a google cardboard from one of our middle school campuses and brought it into my classroom. One of our technologist specialist, Ann Witherspoon created a Symbaloo with lots of VR apps for the primary and secondary classrooms. I downloaded one of the apps "VR Safari" on my iPhone and let my students explore the app. You could hear all the "oohs and aahs" as the students walked around the classroom with a google cardboard in their hands. They had never heard of Google Cardboard so this was a perfect opportunity for them to learn about it. After the activity, rotated it through tables, the students wrote a summary of all the animals they had seen within the app. I immediately began thinking how I could use this in my Daily 5 Stations for writing activities , describing animal characteristics, or just simply let my students pretend they are inside a virtual world and write a story of their virtual field trip.

I began looking for ways other classrooms were using Google Cardboard in their lessons and how to bring those experiences into a 2nd bilingual classroom. I found several resources that may help you when planning for innovative lessons using Google Cardboard. Here are several resources you may want to check out. I know this will be an activity that will continue in my classroom and bring in experiences to my students that provide great learning opportunities.

About Me

Empowering students to create their own digital footprint, Edmodo Certified Trainer and Ambassador, Recognized by the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics in 2015. Level 1 Google Certified, 28 years experience in the classroom.